Most voice mail systems today are arranged to send notification messages to voice mail recipients, in order to notify the recipients when new voice mail messages exist. A rudimentary voice mail system, for instance, may send a notification message to a switch that serves the called party, and the switch may responsively send an alert signal to the called party's telephone to cause a voice mail alert, such as a lit LED or a voice-mail icon, to appear on the telephone. When a user receives the voice mail notification, the user may then call the voice mail system and direct the system to play out the message. Further, once connected to the voice mail system, the user may otherwise manage the user's mailbox, such as to replay, delete, or forward any stored messages.
A deficiency of such rudimentary voice mail systems, however, is that their voice mail notification messages do not provide a user with information about the voice mail message but rather provide a simple indication that a voice mail message exists. Consequently, the user may not know who left the message or when the message was left, until the user goes through the effort of calling the voice mail system.
In an effort to overcome this deficiency, methods for enhanced voice mail notification have been developed. For instance, a voice mail system may be arranged to send a voice mail notification to an e-mail address, pager, fax number, or other voice mail box, providing text data about the message, such as caller name, time of call, length of message, and the like. Further, a voice mail system may be arranged to send such an enhanced notification to the user's telephone, and the telephone may be configured to log the message and to allow the user to select the message from a display list in order to automatically retrieve the message. This latter method is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/260,655 (the '655 application), entitled “Method and System for Providing Access to Voice Mail Messages,” filed Sep. 30, 2002, the entirety of which is hereby incorporated by reference. Still further, a voice mail system may be arranged to send a digitized audio recording of the voice mail message itself as an attachment to a voice mail notification, such as an e-mail attachment for instance. Upon receipt of the file, the user can then play out the audio recording without the need to connect to the voice mail system.
Unfortunately, however, even these enhanced voice mail notification systems suffer from certain deficiencies. For instance, systems that provide a user with text data regarding a message, even as in the '655 application, unfortunately require the user to go through the effort of reading the text data in order to determine whether to take the next step of connecting to voice mail system and listening to the message. Further, enhanced voice mail notification systems that send a voice mail message to a user as an audio file attachment may conveniently allow the user to play out the message locally, but such systems do not allow the user to manage the message at the voice mail server. Thus, after listening to the message locally, the user would need to then go through the effort of calling into the voice mail server in order to delete or otherwise manage the message. Consequently, an improvement is desired.